If you’re in the process of researching marketing automation solutions, Marketo, Act-On and Hubspot are probably on your short list.

These tools promise to free your marketing staff from tedious, manual processes so that they can get on with the business of nurturing quality leads for your sales organization. But how do they deliver on that promise?

Improvements to my organization:

Our organization was operating blindfolded before implementing Act-On. We're able to have complete visibility into our website visitor behavior and easily integrate this into our CRM. We're able to segment our visitors based on behavior and lead score and serve them to the sales team on a platter.- Joe G.

Room for improvement:

One area of improvement would be ability to use dynamic content fields. It is available, but not to the fullest extent where it would help me.- Elizabeth C.

HubSpot

Valuable features:

It works well for email automation and workflows.
It has reasonable social tracking module.- James C., senior application developer at a tech vendor with 1000+ employees

The most valuable feature for us is the lead-nurturing workflows. They give us the ability to create automated workflows that will operate certain flows-of-action automatically on a duration of time I set. This enables us to decide that a certain segment of database will receive content throughout time without us having to do it. - Efrat F., Senior Director of Marketing Communications at a tech vendor with 100-1000 employees

Room for improvement:

They need to improve their reports and the ability to customize them.- James C.

The module of scoring can improve immensely. It uses manual scoring, which is a tedious process because you have to design in advance and update it all the time. They've recently added predictive scoring, but it won't replace manual scoring. It's only complementary and is too manual and cumbersome. It can't aggregate scores and I have to input them manually, which is annoying. What's also missing are guidelines for best practices for scoring so that it instructs you on how to build scoring strategy.- Efrat F.

Other advice:

When considering this product, check if all the features you need are in the tier you are planning to pay for.- James C.

You may have heard of ‘bright shiny object syndrome’. The term is used to describe new initiatives undertaken by organisations that either lack a strategic approach, or suffer from a failure to effectively implement.

The technology I'm talking about here is data and marketing automation. Current digital marketing methodology, much as it is practiced at Bluewolf, dictates the need for a strategy that does four things: Finds the right audience, uses the right channel, delivers the right content, and does all of that at the right time.

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